This article describes a comprehensive approach to fully automated assessment of children's oral reading fluency (ORF), one of the most informative and frequently administered measures of children's reading ability. Speech recognition and machine learning techniques are described that model the 3 components of oral reading fluency: word accuracy,…

Measuring school and classroom environments has become central in a nation-wide effort to develop comprehensive programs that measure teacher quality and teacher effectiveness. Formulating successful programs necessitates accurate and reliable methods for measuring these environmental variables. This paper uses a generalizability theory framework…

The importance of subscores in educational and psychological assessments is undeniable. Subscores yield diagnostic information that can be used for determining how each examinee's abilities/skills vary over different content domains. One of the most common criticisms about reporting and using subscores is insufficient reliability of subscores.…

The study sought to compare factors influencing male and female lecturers' job satisfaction. Cross-sectional survey designs employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted for the study. Simple random sampling was used to select 163 lecturers from the four oldest public universities in Ghana. Celep's (2000) Organisational…

With inquiry being one of the central tenets of the national and most state standards, it is imperative that we have a solid means to measure the quality of inquiry-based instruction being led in classrooms. Many instruments are available and used for this purpose, but many are either invalid or too global. This study sought to compare two…

Where as video cameras are a reliable and established technology for the measurement of kinematic parameters, accelerometers are increasingly being employed for this type of measurement due to their ease of use, performance, and comparatively low cost. However, the majority of accelerometer-based studies involve a single channel due to the…

In recent years, the social sciences have seen a resurgence in the study of divergent thinking (DT) measures. However, many of these recent advances have focused on abstract, decontextualized DT tasks (e.g., list as many things as you can think of that have wheels). This study provides a new perspective by exploring the reliability and validity…

Literacy educators and researchers have long recognized the importance of increasing students' writing proficiency across age and grade levels. With the release of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a new and greater emphasis is being placed on writing in the K-12 curriculum. Educators, as well as the authors of the CCSS, agree that…

The International Test Commission's "Guidelines for Translating and Adapting Tests" (2010) provide important guidance on developing and evaluating tests for use across languages. These guidelines are widely applauded, but the degree to which they are followed in practice is unknown. The objective of this study was to perform a…

Usage patterns for common nouns continue to change well past the early years of language acquisition in free naming (Andersen, 1975; Ameel, Malt, & Storms, 2008). The current research evaluates whether this continued evolution is shown in receptive judgments as well, given their differing cognitive demands. We found an extended learning…

The development of college students' civic identity is understudied, but worthy of attention because of its salience to many students and higher education's commitment to fostering an engaged citizenry. Using 45,271 participants from the 2009 Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership, this study uses structural equation modeling to explore…

Children's peer relationships are frequently assessed with peer nominations. An important methodological issue is whether to collect unlimited or limited nominations. Some researchers have argued that the psychometric differences between both methods are negligible, while others have claimed that one is superior over the other. The current study…

An international comparative research project was carried out in the Netherlands, Wales, Germany and Finland to understand how trainee teachers reflect upon play. Data was collected among 31 Dutch, 37 Welsh, 40 German and 19 Finnish teacher trainees. They watched four videotaped sequences of preschoolers engaged in an activity. Next, they answered…

Many measurement tools on creativity are available in the literature. One of these scales is Creativity Fostering Teacher Behaviour Index (CFTIndex) developed for Singaporean teacher originally. It was then translated into Turkish and trialled on teachers in Nigde province with acceptable reliability and factorial validity. The main purpose of…

Current teaching standards and practices are dictated, at least in part, by state- and district-mandated standardized tests. Yet, despite being surrounded by data, teachers receive only basic trainings on how to use assessments. In reality, teachers use data and assessments daily--even minute by minute--through the assessment process, which uses…